Luís Buñuel’s last and possibly best film That Obscure Object of Desire, begins with a scene in which Mathieu, a grey-bearded, houndstooth-suited Frenchman, dumps a bucketful of water on the head of his young lover, Conchita, as she attempts to board a train on which he is fleeing from her. Apparently shocked and pathetically drenched, she stops chasing him. Mirroring the train’s inevitable progress toward its destination, a handful of flashbacks go by, and we learn that Conchita has been repeatedly goading Mathieu with sexual promises she doesn’t keep, turning him on and frustrating him in equal and increasing measure. She’s saving herself for marriage, she says; Ma thieu, thinking gratification is just around the corner, puts up with it. One night, he discovers Conchita performing some kind of strip-Flamenco for seedy tourists. Nearly foaming at the mouth, Mathieu stops the show and interrogates her. He knew she worked as a dancer, but this?
“Oh please…” Conchita shrugs. She seems surprised that Mathieu could have been so naïve. “Even children know about this.”
And here, Mathieu’s face is priceless.
This is more or less how one feels after reading Tom McCarthy’s latest novel Satin Island (Knopf, 2015). This clever, vexing novel follows an anthropologist named U. working for a corporation whose leader asks him to “write the Great Report… the Book. The First and Last Word on our age… What I want you to do, he said, is name what’s taking place right now.” This assignment forms part of the Koob-Sassen Project, an enterprise so big and insidious that “there’s probably not a single area of your daily life that it hasn’t, in some way or other, touched on, penetrated, changed; although you probably don’t know this.” So, bopping about Europe and working on this report, U. floats between half-baked revelations about the Internet and the suicidal undertone of parachuting before arriving in Manhattan—which he’s imbued with central significance by way of a Borgesian dream-sequence—only to realize that when he gets there, nothing happens. It’s a novel of sexy ideas, none of which fully reveals itself before becoming something new.
I’m a longtime McCarthy fan, and for those who are too, I think it’s safe to say that Satin Island is more of a distant cousin to his 2005 Remainder than a logical follow-up to his 2010 C. But what concerns me is not so much defining Satin Island‘s place in McCarthy’s work as understanding its structure among works like it. Why? Because, despite its seeming improvisation, this type of plot—the plot that writers like Jonathan Franzen typically avoid by way of dramatic structure so tight it would make Aristotle blush—has an ample tradition. It’s everywhere, actually. If you pressed me to describe its structure, I’d say it’s as though one of the great meta-detectives novels of our time (Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, or Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy are all good examples) took a wrong turn in its controlled universe of clues and twists, questions and answers, and ended up in a surreal landscape like those of Yves Tanguy, where nothing has any weight and everything seems to be slowly falling apart.¹
In fact, novels like Satin Island have less in common with the literary mysteries cited above than with the novels of Roberto Bolaño or films like Paul Thomas Anderson’s adaptation of Pynchon’s Inherent Vice: detective fiction so meta it’s transcendent and so soft-boiled it’s practically uncooked. Like Pynchon’s stoned detective, this type of story follows a series of false clues and fanciful asides before resolving a central problem unsatisfactorily, wonkily, forcing you to realize that its subject is not that obscure object of desire but its relentless chasers. Dragging along U.’s rote sex life (“I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette…”) and the progressive death of his (only?) friend, Satin Island, like Mathieu, chases a sublime understanding of the desired object, but doesn’t catch it. It’s as if Mathieu were on a mission to define the intricacies of the late capitalist landscape and the answer were “Conchita.”
This style has its virtues; first among them is that it furnishes pretext for unrelenting subtlety. Attitudes, atmospheres, and general vibes are given exquisite attention while allowing scenes to linger in a haze of detached mirth. Nothing really has to happen, so nothing does. As U., the narrator of McCarthy’s book warns early on, “events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now.” Instead, to move itself forward, the story relies on a constant climate of low-level dread and metaphysical anxiety. Roberto Bolaño’s novels epitomize this technique. Take his monstrous cast of characters in his 650-page The Savage Detectives: often, instead of generating the events that form a good story, Bolaño’s characters simply predict future events—vague ones—that are generally undesirable and bad-sounding. Here, giving off high levels of dread, one such character forecasts the shadowy destiny of Bolaño’s two protagonists Ulíses and Arturo (the eponymous detectives) and the novel as a whole.
“Now let’s take the desperate reader, who is presumably the audience for the literature of desperation. What do we see? First, the reader is an adolescent or an immature adult, insecure, all nerves. He’s the kind of fucking idiot (pardon my language) who committed suicide after reading Werther… Furthermore: desperate readers are like the California gold mines. Sooner or later they’re exhausted! Why? It’s obvious! One can’t live one’s whole life in desperation. In the end the body rebels, the pain becomes unbearable, lucidity gushes out in great cold spurts… I told them [Ulíses and Arturo] so. I warned them… I alerted them to the dangers. Don’t exhaust the vein! Humility! Seek oneself, lose oneself in strange lands! But with a guiding line, with bread crumbs or white pebbles! And yet I was mad, driven mad by them, by my daughters, by Laura Damián, and so they didn’t listen.”
The reader is thus hooked; she keeps reading, waits to see whether these predictions are right. What will happen to Ulíses and Arturo? Will their bodies give out to their desperation? And what about that bit about the suicide? Might they fall into a similar trap? Similarly, consider McCarthy’s portentous description of U.’s in-flight sleep after he’s watched a television report on an oil spill:
“… oil seemed to lie around the very cloud-patches the wing-lights were illuminating: to lurk within and boost their volume, as though absorbed by them, and to seep out from them as well, in blobs and globules that hovered on their ledges, sat about their folds and crevasses, like so many blackened cherubs.”
Or of the ventilation system in his office, in which the novel’s entire argument is contained:
“It was cavernous and booming… Other, vaguer voices hovered in the general noise—or if not voices, at least patterns, with their ridges and their troughs, their repetition frequencies, their cadences and codas. Sometimes these patterns took on visual forms, like those that so enchanted eighteenth century scientists when they scattered salt on Chladni plates and, exposing these to various acoustic stimuli, observed the intricate design that ensued… I, too, in my basement, sometimes thought I saw… the plan, formula, solution… before, waking with a jolt, I watched it all evaporate, like salt in a quiet breeze.”
McCarthy’s talent for dread—that feeling of something big lurking beyond the present, something whose contours you can only make out for a second—is enough to power his novel too. Yet, at the same time, when these portentous monologues go on for 26 chapters, as they do in The Savage Detectives, or last an entire book, as in Satin Island, the reader’s anticipation often becomes boredom—albeit a happy boredom which pleases us because it’s still fueled by foreboding. As Adam Phillips observes in his psychoanalytic classic On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: “For the adult, it seems, boredom needs to be the more permanent suspended animation of desire.” Reading, we know that nothing is happening, and yet we’re helplessly strung along by the desire that something might. ²
Nine Nights by Bernardo Carvalho is another novel that Satin Island recalls, not only for its sedated plot or its critical preoccupation with an anthropologist, but for the productive way it deals with this desirous boredom. First published in 2002, Carvalho’s book is a documentary-paced presentation of a twenty-first-century novelist’s failure to explain the life and death of Buell Quain, an American anthropologist who after graduating from Columbia studied the Krahô people in Brazil before killing himself among them in 1939.³ Needless to say, there are no events here. The novelist spends almost the entire text weighing hypotheses on Quain: was he “racked by illness”? Was he “in mortal danger”? Is it true that he “‘Forced himself into homosexuality with blacks, of whom he has a horror’”? Even when the book’s exciting, it’s boring. Yet, while McCarthy’s anthropologist is meaningfully engaged in watching videos buffer or Carvalho’s novelist is yet again insinuating that Quain was in fact functionally insane, the reader feels this boredom just as strongly as she shares the characters’ exquisite desire. Just as Mathieu’s frustration is partly pleasurable since it represents the anticipation of a reward, our boredom is partly pleasurable since it waits for the moment in which the book runs out of secrets to keep. This is the moment in which the book either greets its reader with open arms or slithers away, Conchita-like, unwilling to admit to its reader that its story has collapsed.
Nine Nights does the first while Satin Island does the second. This is why Nine Nights wonderfully eschews the smirking tone of a novel driven mostly by ideas. Unlike Satin Island, which ends with U.’s clever musings on a homeless man trying to use a payphone—U. finds him “anachronistic,” perhaps highlighting U.’s own confusion in defining the present—Nine Nights ends almost tragically, as though the narrator (and Carvalho himself) were sad that he couldn’t offer you more. After losing his time to reconstructing a Buell Quain that increasingly seems more like a man on a perverse and nostalgic voyage than an anthropologist, the narrator finds himself on a plane back to Brazil.
“Coincidentally, we were flying over the region where Quain had killed himself. That was when the guy next to me, for the first time, paused and asked me if his light was bothering me. I said no, I could never sleep on planes. He smiled and said he couldn’t either. He was too excited about his trip to sleep… I asked him if he was going on holiday. He smiled again and responded proudly and enthusiastically: ‘I’m going to study the Brazilian Indians.’ I couldn’t manage another word… I suddenly remembered learning, on one of those television shows about ancient civilizations, that the Nazca of the Peruvian desert cut out the tongues of the dead and tied them up in a bag so that they could never return to torment the living. I turned to the other side, fighting my own nature, and tried to sleep, even if only to quiet the dead.”
He has good reason to want to quiet the dead; he’s failed to understand Quain, and what’s more menacing than a voice beyond the grave accusing you of having given up on them? I’ve been saying that Satin Island is propelled by the same erotic, aimless anxiety found in Bolaño and at the thematic core of That Obscure Object of Desire—an anxiety that collapses yet doesn’t resolve. This is true of Nine Nights insofar as the voyeur’s desire to know what sordid (or totally banal) secret led Buell Quain to kill himself in Brazil is what makes the novel’s disparate episodes cohere. But as opposed to McCarthy’s characters (who are so hollow they would be more appropriately called concepts or specters), those of Carvalho have a harrowing fullness to them: as a reader, you follow their emotional logic; you get what they’re going through. There’s a bitter sincerity in their quest, a sincerity all but overlooked by McCarthy’s novel and perhaps more apparent in Bolaño’s gruesome and redemptive 2666 than in The Savage Detectives.
In one of Nine Nights’s more touching scenes we learn that Quain’s ceaseless traveling was for him a way to “try to come back to himself, to a place where he would no longer be forced to see himself” and his death a shortcut to this self-blindness. Such stylistic illogic will be familiar to readers of Bolaño—how exactly does one “come back to himself” by projecting himself endlessly elsewhere, with the biggest elsewhere being death?—but more important, it echoes a familiar and durable literary sentiment, perhaps best distilled by Baudelaire in his memorable lines, “This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds… It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not.” Similarly universal is the notion that Quain’s “own self took him by surprise.” Who hasn’t felt that? When we read these quips, it’s clear that we’re not just dealing with McCarthy’s existential limbo but with some heavier, more personal stuff: movement as self-hatred, stillness as self-alienation, and desire of the foreign as migration toward death.
This is neither better nor worse at a literary level, but it makes for a better read. And it makes it all the more lamentable that Carvalho’s not as well-known around here as Bolaño (or as McCarthy for that matter). There’s something beautiful about writing that knows both when to confuse and when to capitulate—it keeps both writer and reader honest. Are U.’s scary predictions about insidious corporate influence in our lives correct? Was Buell Quain a fetishist with father problems? In books as meandering as these, as in the case of Conchita and Mathieu, the best revelations are those that disappoint you by being exactly what you knew but didn’t want to believe.
By Lucas Quatrecasas ’18
¹ For more on Satin Island’s rapport with surrealist tendencies like those of Tanguy and Buñuel, check out McCarthy’s interview with two cats here.
² For what it’s worth, James Wood recognizes both of these novel-forwarding devices in an essay on “Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory” (included in The Broken Estate, 2010). Aimlessness: “Readers of Pynchon often mistake bright lights for evidence of habitation,” he says, bringing the critical hammer down on Pynchon’s mania for flashy and constant changes of scenery, which, Wood suggests, some mistake for “movement, the workings of the novel.” Dread: “Similarly, Pynchon’s evil works in his fiction as an inverted utopia, a dystopia that had no streets or fixtures, that cannot be named… In Gravity’s Rainbdow, Slothrop, an American intelligence officer based in wartime London, is obsessed with the idea that ‘they’ are out to get him… But we never find out who ‘they’ are.” Wood sees this as a symptom of Pynchon’s vice of allegory, something which deadens his characters and conflates “the paranoia of dreams” with a utopian ideal. Although this last point is of little relevance to the present essay, I’d say that the allegorical skeleton of Satin Island is at points disturbingly visible and that equating dream-logic with one’s personal paradise is practically what made Bolaño famous.
³ Vintage published an English translation of Nine Nights in 2008. In its original Portuguese, the novel is called Nove Noites. In it, interestingly, the Krahô perform a ritual in which women empty buckets of water over the heads of the men they are forbidden to have sex with. So, for me at least, it is an extraordinary coincidence that, near the end of Buñuel’s film, Conchita returns Mathieu’s insult by emptying a bucket of water on his head too—a symbolic ritual between the two lovers in its own right.
